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Enlisting the Stars to Tilt at the Right

THE one-room office of Beau Friedlander's Context Books in Lower Manhattan is a wreck. Piles of dusty, dog-eared manuscripts climb to the ceiling like stalagmites. Scraps of Scotch tape and paper curl off the wall like plane-tree bark. The paint on the wooden floor is badly chipped, and the tin ceilings are furry with grime. Sitting at his littered desk, Mr. Friedlander, 34, unshaven and in a loose-fitting black button-down, peers out of the clutter a bit like a groundhog poking its head out of a hole.

''Someone said today, 'You'll be out of business when Bush is out of office,' '' Mr. Friedlander said. ''I don't think I will. We'll just move on to globalization. If we do our jobs right, we're going to sway the election and remove him from power.''

Mr. Friedlander's office might be a perfect symbol for the state of radical-left politics in the United States these days: disorganized, energetic, grappling to reconcile its past of pamphlets, books and big ideas with the immediacy of the digital present -- well-organized conservative Web sites, the Fox News Channel -- and the easily obtainable temptations of the bourgeoisie, like Mr. Friedlander's fancy chrome-colored Trek 4500 mountain bike, which he rides to work each day from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and stores against a bookshelf blocking the exit.

As the publisher of two recent best-selling quickie paperbacks that emerged from, and then codified, opposition to the war in Iraq -- ''War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know'' by William Rivers Pitt, and ''Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You,'' by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich -- Mr. Friedlander, who first made a splash in 1999 when he acquired a manuscript from Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, has the chutzpah to believe that he may be the man to overturn the paradigm, both in publishing and in the White House. His idea: to package Noam Chomskyesque political tracts with well-known names on the cover that propel them through the media din. Sean Penn wrote the afterword to ''Target Iraq.'' ''War on Iraq'' was based on a lengthy interview with Scott Ritter, a former United Nations arms inspector.

Mr. Friedlander says that altogether, he shipped more than 100,000 copies of those books, and he is soon to publish two more quickie tracts, one by Mr. Ritter on the failed effort, so far, to find chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq, and another by John Bonifaz, a young Boston lawyer associated with leftist causes and a recent winner of a MacArthur ''genius'' award for his advocacy of campaign reform.

Pamphleteering is a long-running American pursuit -- from Thomas Paine to ''9-11,'' Mr. Chomsky's tract on the terrorist attacks, which has sold about 750,000 copies worldwide. But at a time when young people are more likely to blog their arguments than to publish them in print, Mr. Friedlander stands out. Indeed, there was a time when downtown Manhattan used to be full of people like him -- young, left-leaning independent publishers whose political convictions provided their enterprises the lifeblood that cash could not. Some conservatives might say that the demise of this breed has amounted to a kind of neighborhood improvement, but perhaps even the most die-hard Bill O'Reilly enthusiast might muster a twinge of empathy for a scrappy political partisan trying to sell his ideas to the mainstream.

''I'm a throwback,'' Mr. Friedlander said. ''The day of totally undercapitalized idealists in publishing has come and gone. For a progressive publisher to stand a chance out there, it has to play the same game as Fox. It's got to be dressed up for company. To do that I have to use the same tools all the rest of the mainstream media is using -- the lure of celebrity or the lure of a topic that's in the news cycle.''

Dan Simon, who heads Seven Stories Press, which published Mr. Chomsky's quick-book, said that Mr. Friedlander's coupling of political argument with celebrities and mainstream politicians is new.

''The notion of a short, quick, well-done book that has information that people can't get from TV and that has an activist slant is one of the things people really want from bookstores,'' he said. ''Beau has done it in a way that's different.''

Mr. Friedlander grew up in Redding, Conn., in what he called a ''typical fractured middle-class family.'' His mother died of a brain hemorrhage when he was 17, he said. When he was 25, his stepfather, a heavy drinker and smoker, died as well. As Mr. Friedlander put it, ''He died of her dying.''

Mr. Friedlander traces his political awakening to St. Luke's prep school in New Canaan, Conn.

After college at Bennington, he earned a master's degree in English romantic literature at Oxford University and another master's in Scandinavian literature at Columbia, before trying a short-term gig at Knopf. He started Context with his life savings -- $10,000 -- and with a dream of discovering and publishing great fiction. He set up shop in the dingy windowless cell he still occupies on lower Broadway with a single assistant, but finding the next Faulkner or Fitzgerald wasn't so easy.

Mr. Friedlander bided his time by repackaging down-market foreign titles for sale in the United States. His offerings, he said, were as varied as classical CD's and cookbooks.

''I was asked if I could do a Chinese wildlife encyclopedia once, and I said, 'I don't know -- why not?' '' Mr. Friedlander said.

In 1999, he heard that Mr. Kaczynski was trying to sell a 528-page manuscript called ''Truth Versus Lies'' and that no mainstream publisher would touch it. Mr. Friedlander, who likes to say that he approaches life ''with a big bag of question marks,'' was intrigued. ''I've always been drawn to darker manifestations in our culture, and Kaczynski is definitely one of them,'' he said.

He wrote to Mr. Kaczynski, developed a correspondence and eventually won his confidence and the rights to the book. News that an unknown 29-year-old was publishing the Unabomber prompted Mr. Friedlander's first wave of publicity -- he was denounced as a ''moral cretin'' in The New York Post, for example. But things between author and editor quickly soured over legal issues, and the book was canceled. The relationship ended with a call from a maximum-security federal prison.

''His exact words were, 'You've got to be crazy if you think I'm going to let you publish this,' followed by a string of curse words and saliva sounds being shot out at high velocity,'' Mr. Friedlander recalled.

Mr. Friedlander then turned to the more placid task of publishing fiction. He couldn't afford to pay advances, so he offered his labor up front and royalties on the back end.

That was enough for an underappreciated coterie of writers like David Means, Daniel Jensen and Daniel Quinn, author of the best-selling ''Ishmael,'' who preferred an old-school editor to the risks of big-media publishing. Mr. Means's book, ''Assorted Fire Events,'' was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and won the Los Angeles Times book prize for fiction in 2000 over Michael Chabon. Mr. Jensen's memoir, ''A Language Older Than Words,'' sold more than 20,000 copies, Mr. Friedlander said, and is in its eighth printing. Even so, cash is still a regular problem.

''There have been times when we've had budget crunches, and we are slow making payments,'' he said.

One such time was in the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Friedlander's office is just blocks from ground zero; he had no phone service for three months. His fortunes were tied to two books due out that month, and with Mr. Friedlander uprooted and the nation's attention elsewhere, the books languished.

''It put us in a big hole,'' he said. ''I almost lost it.''

Then last summer, Mr. Friedlander said, as the Bush administration began to build its case for war against Iraq, his political instincts kicked in. He read an interview by William Rivers Pitt, a left-leaning journalist, with Mr. Ritter, the former arms inspector, on the liberal Web site TruthOut.com, and had an idea to turn around an extended version of the interview, supplemented with some additional reporting by Mr. Pitt.

Mr. Friedlander said his motivation was political, not economic, but when the book came out a month later, in September, it began to sell. He gave away 3,000 copies at antiwar rallies, offered deep discounts to advocacy groups and leaned on politically active celebrities like Mike Farrell, the ''M*A*S*H'' star, which spread the word and drove sales.

The book made several best-seller lists -- it reached No. 4 on The San Francisco Chronicle list in April -- and provided Mr. Friedlander with something he hadn't had much of in the past: revenue. The experience inspired him to publish ''Target Iraq'' in late January, with an endorsement by Mr. Penn. He gave Mr. Ritter three weeks to crank out his next quickie book. And Mr. Bonifaz, the lawyer, has about a month.

Mr. Friedlander said more political tracts are on the way.

''This is just the opening war whoop,'' he said. ''Political books have reinvigorated me financially. Partisanship is where it's at in this market.''